Writer of fantasy and other fictions

Tag Archives: Twins

I’ve been away for a while. I have things to say, but not enough time to type them out coherently. Hopefully that will change, maybe by July.

In the meantime, visit this slideshow about a village in Kerala (India) that has an unusually high incidence of twinning.

NIKLAS HALLE'N / BARCROFT MEDIA, From the Telegraph (UK)

There were twins in my elementary school for all of six weeks–I remember them getting on the school bus in matching dresses. I “dated” an antipodean guy who was a twin–or said he was–but his twin was back home; 12,000 miles is too far to go for fact-checking (are you still a twin when you’re that far away?). I know a pair of identical twin sisters who–due to post-birth factors–don’t look at all alike (I think there was even an Oprah show about this. Or Sally Jessie?).

I like books that run with the twin idea. West Africa has the highest rate of twinning in the world, and a culture that reflects that. Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl tells the story of a young girl from London who travels back to Nigeria with her family and meets her twin sister who died shortly after their birth.

Twins are a sort of naturally occurring doppleganger, a living representation of other possibilities, of paths not taken, and yet to take. Maybe I’m fascinated because I find other people so hard to get along with that I wish I had another me to be my friend.

This great slideshow on the NY Times site shows side-by-side photos of identical twins. It’s supposed to be about the effect of environmental factors (smoking, stress, extreme tanning) on the appearance of aging.

NY Times Slideshow of Ageing in Twins

I don’t care so much about the scary implications about wrinkles and eyebags, but it is fascinating to go back and forth between two sames-that-are-not-the-same. It does something itchy to my brain.